The Power BI Desktop September version is loaded with many features I find useful. They aren’t perfect but a very important step in the right direction to becoming a mature BI product which is not only easy to use and cheap, but also full of important features. Here are the main additions in my opinion:

• Drillthrough to another report page. It’s a basic feature in other products, which has finally arrived to Power BI. It allows you to define a page as one that other pages can drill through to it, passing a filter. A good example is a customer page, where you show details of a specific customer. Then, from a sales page, you can click on a transaction and drill through to the customer page, with the specific customer id as a filter. It’s very useful, and my only issue with it is that the way to drill through is by right clicking and choosing to drill through via a pop-up menu. I would prefer a simpler functionality but I’m not really complaining.
• Explain increase/decrease. A cool new feature that elevates the already existing machine learning capabilities of Power BI. Say you have a bar chart which shows an increase from August to September. You can click on the September bar and ask to explain the increase. A few possible explanations, with charts, will show up to suggest a reason for the increase.
• Theming the chart style controls. Everyone has their own preferences as to how their visualisations should look like. This important new feature allows you to set up your own defaults as a theme, leaving behind the need to edit preferences for each and every visualisation you add. The only downside is that you need to do it by editing a json-object file. Hopefully at some point a nicer menu is added.

There are many other new features, here’s the video summarising all of them:

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